Since 2002, Organic/Mechanic has been the personal website of Adam Harvey.

Tag: red tape

Tuesday, 30 April 2002

4.30.02INT. MAINBUILDING, OFFICEOFRESIDENCELIFE. 7:53am DAY

sign­ing up for my sum­mer hall clerk hours i re­al­ized that red tape is the man­ner in which bu­reau­cra­cies re­main in ex­is­tence. they con­vince you time and again that they have a new or­ga­ni­za­tion­al plan that will make things run very smooth­ly and they make them­selves in­dis­pen­si­ble by fur­ther con­vinc­ing us that with­out their pres­ence, things would go to hell. then they bind us with their red tape and forms in trip­li­cate un­til we are gagged and nau­seous and will fill them out just to be done with them. case in point, the forms that we were shown at an in­for­ma­tion­al meet­ing for sum­mer hall staff (an­oth­er trap of the bu­reau­cra­cy) had been re­placed en­tire­ly by a dif­fer­ent spread­sheet for the fill­ing in of hours, as well, the dorms that the clerks for con­fer­ences are as­signed to are on the oth­er side of cam­pus from the dorms that the clerks live in, which in turn are used by a dif­fer­ent set of clerks who in turn live in a dif­fer­ent set of dorms…ad in­finum. signups were sup­posed to take ten min­utes. they take an hour. we are told shifts are avail­able in one hour increments…no longer, now they are 3 or 4 hour in­cre­ments. so in­stead of work­ing a nice evening shift in the dorm i live in i must haul my ass across cam­pus 4 nights a week to work the grave­yard shift in a dorm that wasn’t even sup­posed to be for the groups i am run­ning the desk for. at least i have my week­ends free. the on­ly un­for­tu­nate thing about that is know­ing that the bu­reau­crat­ic hege­mony WANTS me to feel hap­py about JUST hav­ing my week­ends free. we bour­geois are don­keys and the week­end is the car­rot that keeps us truck­in’